20/06/2025
I've been writing on this page for a little over six years now alhamdulillah.
And in this time, I've been shocked twice.
Here are the two most unexpectedly controversial things I've said, controversy which took me completely by surprise as I thought I was just writing straightforward facts that everyone agreed on:
1. Promoting early marriage and generally making Nikah easier in a time when Zina is so easy
And
2. Promoting chastity, modesty, and virginity before marriage in a time and place where promiscuity, fornication, OnlyFans prostitution, and hyper-s*xuality are so rampant.
Two simple, straightforward Islamic concepts that I grew up learning and imbibing naturally and witnessing firsthand as a child, in a very different time and place.
In Egypt, over thirty years ago, these basic facts were understood as undeniable, universal, irrefutable realities. Everyone knew that overarching Islamic principles guide us towards modesty (الحياء, haya'), marriage, and family, and steer us away from fornication (الزنا), adultery, and any illicit s*xual behavior and immorality (الفحشاء والمنكر).
Simple.
In the 1990s, in the rural Egyptian village where I was born and raised, old illiterate farmers and unschooled middle-aged women and little kids in the alley playing soccer barefoot with a "ball" made of bundled socks and rubber bands, and everyone in between, would laugh you out of the room if you tried to ask them for proof from the Quran and hadith for the importance of things like virginity. Or if you tried to insist that we must teach daughters and sons all the same exact things. Or if you tried to tell them that marrying early was bad and that it's (Islamically!) better to ma******te rather than get married young.
They'd literally laugh at you, have a good belly laugh and get tears in their eyes from laughter, and just shake their heads.
Nobody would entertain such nonsense.
Islam was lived. It permeated society, was breathed in like air and was held firmly in place by things like collective understanding, common Islamic-cultural norms, and a healthy dose of positive shame that kept you from acting on your foolishness in public.
Everyone knew that men and women are different. That husbands and wives played very different roles. That marriage was important. That you should get married at the earliest chance possible when a good match was found. That s*x was reserved for within marriage only, and virginity was important for before marriage and that chastity continued with you for the rest of your life. That promiscuity was shameful and brought shame to you, your family, and society. That mothers nurtured and fathers provided. That dignity and honor came through Islam and not anything else.
These, and other simple facts, were old-school common sense not in need of explanation.
Fast forward.
In a different time and place, in 2025 in the enlightened west, there are some American Muslims who follow American Islam TM, who see "nuance" everwhere and feel the need to "complicate" and "problematize" everything. They see stating Islamic legal rulings as "shaming" and "judging." They don't know basic concepts. They are so sophisticated and learned and advanced that basic biological realities elude them, that simple logic escapes them. That mainstream Islamic ideas that have been standard and mainstream and معروف (literally "known") need to be debated and proved and established from scratch.
Self-evident things are no longer self-evident.
We have become so distant from traditional understanding, so disconnected from our own innate intuitions, so liberalized and secularized and modernized in our view of Islam that it has warped our worldview.
Feminism has seeped like poison into our minds, tainting our understanding.
Some of the topics I write about, I already know are going to be seen as controversial and maybe even offensive, like when I write about being a stay-at-home mother, homemaker, housewife; or about the costs of women's education, or of women's careerism, or of women's empowerment. Really anything to do with going against feminism or promoting traditional femininity. I anticipate a certain level of resistance and push back.
But there have been times when I write something I see as perfectly normal and innocent and mainstream, anticipating that reactions will be bored agreement, a nod and a yawn, "Duh, obviously."
But instead I get crazy amounts of push back, vehement disagreement, baffling levels of criticism. People get "triggered" and start lashing out.
None have shocked me more than yesterday's post when some Muslims argued with me in the comments trying to insist that "virginity is 100% a social construct" and means nothing in Islam, and another post I wrote a couple years ago promoting easy nikah and early marriage so the halal is within reach, when some Muslims pushed back aggressively against marriage "too young" (like early 20s) and suggested ma********on instead as an "Islamic solution" sanctioned by Muslim scholars!
What do these reactions tell us about American Islam?
What does this tell us about the state of the ummah and its current condition?
Some modern Muslims, sadly, are unable to hold the line.
They are heavily affected by the wider liberal feminist secular culture around them, influenced by the hegemony of western liberals values. These Muslims inch, day by day, ever closer to the vacuous western principles of "freedom" and "personal autonomy" and "equality" and inch farther away from traditional Islam.
Some Muslims have become unmoored, like a ship that has become unlatched from its anchor and is drifting slowly out into the sea, pushed away by waves, one after the next.
Nowhere is this gradual drifting as clear as when it comes to women's issues: women's roles in family and society, femininity, female traits, s*x and s*xuality, s*xual "rights" and norms, dress codes and restrictions, marriage, motherhood, conceptions of the family.
Hot-button issues.
These issues have become hot coals.
عَنْ أَنَسِ بْنِ مَالِكٍ قَالَ قَالَ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ صَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ: "يَأْتِي عَلَى النَّاسِ زَمَانٌ الصَّابِرُ فِيهِمْ عَلَى دِينِهِ كَالْقَابِضِ عَلَى الْجَمْر."
Anas ibn Malik reported: The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, said, “A time will come upon people in which the one adhering to his religion is like one grasping hot coals.”
[Sunan at-Tirmidhi 2260]
May Allah grant us deep understanding (فقه, fiqh) that can serve as the anchor that grounds us and saves us from becoming an ummah adrift. Ameen.
